The Speaker of Parliament has ordered the Clerk's Office to get thermometers to check temperatures of Parliamentarians and visitors in the wake of the coronavirus scare.

According to Professor Mike Oquaye, hand sanitisers have also been installed at vantage points as part of measures to protect legislators and people who throng the House regularly.

“We don’t want problems for ourselves in this country. The transmission has been identified particularly with handshaking and touching your face.

"Let us treat this with seriousness and honourable members...please take advantage and keep sanitising your hand. You have been all advised.”

Currently, all three of Ghana’s neighbours – Togo, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso – have confirmed cases of the disease, raising fears that the virus may soon hit Ghana.

Since the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak a pandemic, President Akufo-Addo has assured the citizenry that all necessary measures have been taken to step up the county’s preparedness to fight the disease in case of an outbreak.

According to him, government has made available $100 million as part of Ghana’s preparedness and response measures to combat coronavirus threats.

He has also suspended, temporarily, foreign travels for all public officials and advised cultural practices such as handshakes to be stopped completely.

Reiterating these directives, Prof Oquaye urged the MPs to take the various health tips and the measures put in place for their safety seriously.

“This is a contact problem. It moves from contact to contact. So long as the experts and the researchers have made this known, let us be obedient and go by what is being recommended globally.

"Maybe very soon we will all have to adopt the Indian way of greeting. Everybody sees you greeting him or her, yet there are no physical contacts.  We have to do things that will help us," he stressed.